A Student Can't Choose NOT to Be in Fight-Flight-Freeze — But They Can Choose Their Response

So really interesting point here about when someone is in fight or flight mode, the idea that this is kind of a physiological state, it's very difficult to break out of, and you can't just choose to calm down immediately, it takes some time.

But look at this question here, it says, I disagree that it's always a choice, child in fight or flight or freeze, they're just in survival mode, it's physiological.

Like notice the slashes, notice that there's a difference between freezing and fighting and fleeing.

And that difference matters a great deal to us in the classroom.

If a student is frozen or if they feel like they need to avoid someone or a situation, well, that's probably okay.

There are probably some okay ways to do that.

What's critical, though, is that they make the right choice not to fight.

And if we just kind of lump all those together and say, well, all of them are understandable, so all of them are okay, we're going to be in some pretty big trouble.

as far as school safety, as far as just our ability to manage the classroom, because we're justifying something that should not be justified.

Like being in fight or flight does not mean you get to hit people.

It does not mean you get to hurt people.

And this comment prompted me to get out this book that I read several years ago called Behave by Robert Sapolsky.

I know it's probably backwards for you.

And it talks a lot about the idea of culpability and justice.

And as we start to understand better how the brain works and the physiological factors that influence behavior, we're probably eventually going to figure out everything that contributes to behavior.

And yet we can't really imagine a world where there's no responsibility, right?

Where people are not held at all responsible for the effect of their actions on others.

Because what we can do is we can be more understanding and less punitive, like we can remove the suffering aspect from consequences.

But if we're going to keep other people safe, we can't just say, well, I understand where your behavior is coming from physiologically, so it's okay and we have to accept it.

And I think in the classroom, one way we're getting this very, very wrong in many schools is we're saying, well, when this student is agitated or escalated or dysregulated, I'm hearing that word dysregulated a lot, then we need to just give that student a chance to calm down and then they can come right back to class.

And I think that really needs to depend on what they did while they were dysregulated.

Like, yes, often students just need a chance to calm down and they'll be fine.

But if they punched somebody or threw furniture while they were dysregulated, I don't think we're doing our job to just let them come right back to class.

I think we have a greater duty to protect the learning environment, to protect the students, to protect the teacher.

And speaking as a school administrator, I think we have an obligation to put stronger boundaries in place.

And yes, we can have empathy for the student and say, I understand they were dysregulated, but that does not mean that we need to tolerate and not do anything about it when the student makes the choice to fight instead of freeze or flee.

Let me know what you think.